Today we very pleased to announce a major development for Ecorazzi: the launch of our non-profit organization: Microist.

Microist is a fresh take on charitable fundraising, utilizing so much of what is hot today: social media, community driven decisions, crowdsourcing, micro-donations, instant gratification and speed.

We call it Fast-Paced Philanthropy, and for good reason. Every single day money will be going out the door to a different non-profit organization. But this is no individual effort: we need you to be involved every step of the way to Donate, Nominate, & Vote.

The idea for Microist came to us in February. We decided to ask you, our readers, which non-profit organizations should receive a mini-donation from us. We didn’t have a budget and offered up $5. The response was positive, and even though it was a small donation, people got excited. We could tell that you loved to talk about your passions and your favorite charities. It was just $5 and a little publicity for the charity, but it felt good. We decided that we could afford to do $5 a day and we’d let our readers choose the destination for that donation.

But how could we make the idea bigger?Microist is how. We pool our money together and make a donation to charity every single day.

DONATE: When you make a donation to Microist, we divide it into 30 equal parts so that a portion of your donation will reach 30 different charities – because we think it feels good to be a philanthropist, no matter the amount. We are currently accepting donations. We will fund our first charity on September 5, 2011.

NOMINATE: Every day you can submit nominations for your favorite non-profit organization. We’ll randomly select a few to run through our criteria and move on to the next round.

VOTE: Each day we’ll put two organizations head to head in a poll. The organization with the most votes will qualify to be featured on Microist and receive one of our daily donations.

And finally, LEARN. Even if you don’t donate, we hope that you’ll be coming around the site often. We’ll be featuring a different charity daily. We can’t wait to see what all of these organizations are doing and learn about how to get involved.

About Rebecca Carter

Rebecca Carter is the Co-Founder of Ecorazzi. Rebecca was recently featured in the book Hot, Rich, and Green. She is one of 70 eco-achievers featured in Glamour magazine in April 2009, named Best of Green 2010 by Miami Magazine and Best Environmentalist by Miami New Times Best of 2008. She's raising a couple of little boys in Miami and speaks English & Spanish. Find out more at www.RebeccaCarter.net. Follow Rebecca on Twitter: @rebeccacarter

Thanks so much for your donation, David! We appreciate your support and are excited to get this started!

http://smoc.org/vav Kim

I am delighted to find this announcement and read all about Microist! What a great and visionary way to put the world wide web to work. Best of luck with your endeavor. Voices Against Violence, Framingham, MA